


Alle Fragen sind gestellt

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (Functional) Immortality, (the ways you would expect/that have happened in canon only), Ambiguous/Open Ending, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Brief eye squick, Canon-Compliant, Character Study, Elias-Typical Scheming, Eyes, Fewer sentence crimes because it’s 2018 now, Identity, Introspection, Like yes I know what fandom I’m in but listen:, Maybe some mild body horror if you're sensitive to that, Missing Scene, Other, Past Eye Trauma, Post-Episode: e158 Panopticon (The Magnus Archives), The Magnus Intermission, Visually Impaired Character, and its effects on, but also ‘fewer sentence crimes’ is not saying much, but it turns out the canonical tags around the subject are! terrible!, imo it’s negligible at most but this does engage with the results of, maybe even some nostalgia, not necessary to read the others in the series, not ‘vision loss compared to canon’ but ‘this job entails a lot of wear and tear on eyesight’, specifically he’s low vision, there are noteworthy quantities and qualities of eyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:22:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28476858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: After his Archivist has hurled himself blindly into the Lonely — before everything that means must happen next — Elias gets some time to think.
Relationships: The Beholding & Elias Bouchard | Jonah Magnus
Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1217580
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020, The Magnus Intermission: A Weekly Hiatus Prompt Fest





	Alle Fragen sind gestellt

**Author's Note:**

> Fills “ _Passing Time_ ” for the hiatus, and “`Unusual Weapons Concealing`” for BTB (I swear the latter made sense in my head). 
> 
> Stand-alone character study, as usual; the series isn’t finished yet, but ~~I can tell you that one way or another this is probably, chronologically speaking, the end of the line.~~ Well. Never mind that, but it _is_ the last in this universe.

When his ears stop ringing, Elias knows he’s been left alone with his body. He hardly lacks for ways to handle it; there is a sudden surfeit of things that merit his realtime attention, and from here he can even almost — but always almost — see enough. It thrills him and steadies him in equal measure, the numinous awe in what his surroundings can bring to bear, this temple to the only god he cares for as formed by and stolen from a churchbuilder who died a human coward; and the much more practical personal satisfaction, even now, at that having been achieved, and that this space is what it is and is his.

It is not practical, and hardly even useful, to return here often. It does not need his presence to function, Elias is needed relevantly enough elsewhere, and anytime he retraces this path is another chance, however slim in itself, for Elias to lead something else in his wake that he would not benefit from. So the chance to appreciate the Panopticon for what it is — the bright living circulatory system that he’s made define him, a Fresnel lens for the reach of his patron on Earth, the self-reinforcing sensation heightening even the most trivial of thoughts without forming a distraction of its own in any way (save, perhaps, for how it calls him to put words to what it feels like in his bones, and that’s also just Elias as a person, arguably) — this moment is a rare thing in and of itself. He feels the overwhelming-but-momentary urge, not actually a surprising one, to poke himself in the eye about it. Literally, that is. 

So he pokes himself in the eye about it.

Or technically (more than technically; he doesn’t have any eyes there) just to one side—puts two curious fingers on the bloodless edge of his unused lashline. Not for the first time, actually, but he can’t fully suppress the startled shudder all the same, the feeling too brief and too bizarre for him to ever have managed to put together description in the moment despite always thinking he can settle that question this time and not have the impulse reiterate itself at the next opportunity. 

It isn’t something one gets used to either, he supposes; it’s just that knowing that and knowing it’s the kind of flinching reflex, adjusted for his situation, that keeps a person alive, still makes him want to train it away until he can hold still through such a threat and lean in to learn it better. But there will just never be the time, least of all now.

Time has been kind to him, in this way at least: that other body goes largely untouched by it, save for two things— the occasional deliberate intervention on Elias’s own part, very rarely; and the quiet finality of it, uncomfortable but a lesser evil, the way no trace of previous violence has suffered to stay. 

Logistics have admittedly been less kind; which is hardly the usual order of such things in his life overall, _really_. He is careful, he is resilient, he is practiced and he is used to this; he has still, half a dozen times now (half a dozen, he hopes, ever, very soon), taken his life into his own hands alone in a deeply unnatural way, and the margin of error for the actual shape of a working human eye is… well. He’s never been meaningfully blind — and _that_ he does suspect his master and his nature alike wouldn’t allow — and he can read unaided; to insist on using the same fixed viewpoint for everything else as well, forever, would be an absurdity, so that’s really all there is to it. 

In the end it’s just another logistical issue, like identity and the paper trails that come with it; he’s more careful with old glasses than old bodies for the time he knows it will take to get his vision checked and then that largely solves it. Gives him a healthy appreciation for technological advances in optics, if anything. 

His eyes do also only resemble human eyes in the most superficial (appropriately enough, the most visual) of senses at this point; his eyes are not human eyes the way the body out of time keeping himself company is not his body. The way he isn’t, not in every way, not in some ways that he _does_ think sometimes matter, not in the strictest of senses, Jonah Magnus. Which is to say the resemblance is striking for a reason: but the reason is the way that one is the prototype for the other, defining shape and form and genre but now, in unnatural ways, surpassed by it. The eyes aren’t quite as hard and cold as glass prosthetics the way his mind is just that bit more flexible than the written contents of a ledger, concessions needed to function like a human in the world as it is now made and then kept. But there is more to him in time and memory than there could or should be to a mortal man, and more consistency with it; he skates as close as inhumanly possible to being absolutely what he is. Not quite: he can second-guess himself, he can have reason to do so, he can be unsure, and he supposes it just doesn’t occur to him to consider as such the ways he can still change. Jonah Magnus was an uncannily driven man; of course he can remember how it was to live like that: two centuries have calcified and sanded him into an archetype. 

It’s not something he’s ever seen the need to express, but he may admit the need is difficult to see because he knows it would take effort. (He could show someone but— why bother, really? What a venal thing to do with one’s slow-brewing introspection.) So on the measure there’s no answer to how he’d even want to have all this expressed aloud. It’s not like it’s the sort of thing he’d have the motive to answer straightforwardly if someone _asked_ , given; if someone wanted to know then he’d already have better things to do with that. 

He allows himself a moment — just the moment — of annoyance toward Martin; the emotion he was baiting, obviously, though he’s hardly liable to find out and enjoy it, but the reason’s entirely wrong, and what Elias lets himself (somewhat grudgingly) review is the prickling sort of irritation due to someone being baldly wrong about him who he can’t inflict correction on. He’s not even exactly wrong. It’s the attitude more than anything Elias takes issue with, forms a very concrete sense of the issue in question and picks at it like an anxious tic, like a scab.  
  
It’s nothing, it’s really, truly nothing, Martin’s certainly got enough to deal with now (the interplay of fear and dread and resignation and open desire in him is both rapid and satisfyingly nuanced, in fact, as it happens; Elias honestly couldn’t guess what Jon, by the time he finds him — if he finds him — will ultimately find) and he’d all but inevitably take any discussion as some backwards admission of defeat. Doing similarly is certainly one of Peter’s worst traits, even compared to the attempted murder, and he has the good grace or at least the experience to know he’s lying when he does it. Solved questions of Elias’s identity don’t matter, not the way anything he splits his attention between here and now could. But he is also waiting, more acutely than usual, and evidently part of him does need the brief distraction of the known by comparison to splintered and greatly destructive unknowns in motion, because when he lingers too long on one man thinking himself in even more uncertain circles inside the Lonely, or casts his attention up toward the — merely physical, but queasily _comprehensive_ — damage wrought on his Institute above for any detailed length of time, Elias finds his train of thought veers back to the more incongruous and petty sorts of things. Like that.

The second time he runs a finger over the body’s empty lashline (just the one this time, and still ever so lightly) is the same sort of muddy superimposition of wrongness and discomfort, muted sensation that’s simultaneously transposed into his face and utterly anchorless, and even braced with the recent reminder he shudders.

There’s discomfort too in how he can’t quite stop itemizing which disasters in the history of the Institute, exactly, pale in comparison to the situation above. Part of him thinks, recklessly approaching joy: he doesn’t have to care. But that ‘ _have to_ ’ is hardly a settled question, putting aside how well he knows he would regardless. 

Still no progress in the fog, the timeless chill of Forsaken too familiar to be all that intimidating. Just the wind down of those involved settling into the reactions they will have to an environment that doesn’t change. The fact that Elias is confident — almost confident — reasonably and uncommonly confident he’ll have thrown a wrench in this hardly gives him an estimated time of arrival. Or an outcome. Or anything but a view. 

One way or another, this seems likely to rate among the last true undetermined unknowns Elias will ever have to learn the hard way, curiosity slavishly bound to the question of what-will-be approaching at the speed of one second per second and no other. There’s still no place in this universe where he doesn’t face that last, hard boundary, and right now he can’t but stare at it; he couldn’t do anything else if he tried and there wouldn’t be a point to it if he could. All of him is bound now to the pull of _needing to see how it all ends_ , however impractical, however otherwise irrelevant a given moment might have been if ignored. 

He can more than afford to indulge it. To wait.

**Author's Note:**

> I realized a while back how likely it is that freehanding the eye thing, even with supernatural assistance, could result in (for example) otherwise mundane high myopia when using the eyes in his head ~~like some kind of mortal normie~~ , and I’ve been vaguely delighted by the prospect ever since. 
> 
> Also I’m pretty sure that—you know, given the extent to which most genres of pain/fear/discomfort is kind of right out by monster fiat—the only workable non-fatal aversive stimulus you could inflict on Elias would be boredom; and I feel similarly delighted about that, too.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Alle Phrasen eingeübt](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28479609) by [Alias (anafabula)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias)




End file.
